April 15, 2014
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Determined to disprove the cliché that “opposites attract,” Pierson reviewed one million matches at eHarmony and concluded that both men and women, despite their protests to the contrary, want a partner who “resembles them” rather than “complements them.”
However, the variables she focused on were mostly nonphysical: personality traits and political views, for instance. In a separate, presumably more “scientific” study of physical characteristics, participants tended to pick prospective mates “who shared traits like eye and hair color with their opposite gendered parent”and that’s pretty much saying they liked people who looked like them,” as Kate Sullivan at Allure boiled it down.
So do couples who start out looking alike tend to stay together longer, or do couples who stay together longer start to look alike? As usual, all the studies seem to show is that most studies are crap.
Last year, HBO’s Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace dwelt on the absurd and unsuccessful lengths to which the flamboyant showman went to remake his much-younger lover Scott Thorson into his own mirror image.
Being a straight woman and all, I can”t figure out why anyone would want to make over (or in this case, under) the blond hunky Thorson.
Thorson “explains” that Liberace was planning to legally adopt him, you see, and wanted him to look like his son.
Liberace went under the knife a month earlier, but he came close to calling the whole thing off at the last possible minute. According to the plastic surgeon’s longtime office manager, Liberace initially “refused to remove his wig in the operating room” and “had to be persuaded before the surgery could begin.”
Maybe there’s something to all that “narcissism” stuff after all.
